Max Klinger: Etchings, Paintings & Art Prints

Who Was Max Klinger?

Max Klinger is best known as one of the great etchers of the nineteenth century, an artist who mixed sharp, realistic detail with dreams, myths and nightmares. He was a leading figure of German Symbolism, but his everyday settings, from skating rinks to tenement courtyards, make him feel strikingly modern. Our Max Klinger art prints cover every part of his work.

How to spot a Klinger:

1. Black-and-white etching: fine lines and soft grey aquatint tones, often on a wide, letterbox-shaped plate, as in Anxieties.
2. Real life turning into a dream: a modern room, street or beach where something impossible suddenly appears, like the winged creature in Abduction.
3. Picture stories in numbered sets: each cycle carries an opus number and a plate number, like music, and tells a story or plays variations on a theme.
4. Death and desire: lovers, nudes, skeletons and Death himself, often in the same scene, as in Plague.
5. Ornate borders and inscriptions: framed scenes with carved-looking borders, mottoes and small figures in the margins, as in Death as Saviour.

Leipzig, Berlin and a Startling Debut

Max Klinger was born in Leipzig on 18 February 1857. In 1874 he went to the art school in Karlsruhe to study under the painter Karl Gussow, and in 1875 he followed Gussow to the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin, where he finished his studies with a silver medal.

He made his public debut in Berlin in 1878, at the Academy’s 52nd exhibition. His painting The Walker (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin) shows a young man in a bowler hat cornered by thugs against a long, glaring red brick wall, with a revolver in his hand. Klinger himself called it The Red Wall. It was a plain, modern street crime, painted flat as a poster, and nothing like the history paintings around it.

In the same year he showed a picture story at the Berlin Art Association that made his name: the tale of a glove. He learned engraving from the Berlin printmaker Hermann Sagert, and in 1879 moved to Brussels to study with the painter Emile Wauters. His first published cycles followed fast: Etched Sketches (Opus I) and Rescues of Ovid’s Victims (Opus II), both 1879. Early drawings such as Death at the Lake (1880) show where his mind was already turning.

A Glove: The Strangest Love Story in Art

Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove (Ein Handschuh, Opus VI) is Klinger’s most famous work. He created it in 1877–78, aged about 21, showed it in Berlin in 1878 and published it as ten etchings with aquatint in 1881. Our store has all ten plates.

In Place, the first plate, a crowd of smart Berliners gathers at a skating rink. Klinger draws himself in the scene, admiring a young woman. She drops her long glove; in Action he lunges to pick it up and loses his hat. He keeps the glove, and from then on it takes over his dreams.

• Yearnings (Wünsche): the man lies awake while the glove floats above him among flowers.
• Rescue (Rettung): he rows out to save the glove from a stormy sea.
• Triumph (Triumph) and Homage (Huldigung): the glove rides a shell chariot pulled by sea horses, then sits enthroned by the shore.
• Anxieties (Ängste): the sleeper is swept up in waves while a giant hand rises behind him.
• Repose (Ruhe), Abduction (Entführung) and Cupid (Amor): a winged beast smashes through the window and steals the glove, and in the last plate it lies on a table watched by Cupid.

Nobody had made prints like these before: a modern love story told in dream pictures, with no text at all. A generation later the Surrealists treated A Glove as a key forerunner, and the dark plates show a clear debt to the etchings of Goya. Hang it with the dreamlike prints of Odilon Redon and Félicien Rops.

Myths, Dreams and Satire: The Early Cycles

Between 1879 and 1881 Klinger published one cycle after another. They swing between Greek myth, Bible story, fairy tale and comedy, and all mix careful observation with fantasy.

• Rescues of Ovid’s Victims (Opus II, 1879): Klinger rewrites tragic love stories from Ovid with happier endings, as in Pyramus and Thisbe IV and Apollo and Daphne I.
• Eve and the Future (Opus III, 1880): three scenes of Eve, Adam and the serpent, from Eve to The Serpent and Adam, each followed by a grim vision of the “future”.
• Intermezzi (Opus IV, 1881): twelve plates of centaurs, fairy tales and scenes from the novel Simplicissimus, from Bear and Elf to Hunted Centaur and Fallen Rider.

In Fighting Centaurs two centaurs batter each other on a snowy mountainside under a steep peak; Klinger’s admiration for the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, who also painted centaurs and sea creatures, shows clearly here. Klinger later etched a dedication sheet to Böcklin and prints after his paintings, such as Summer Day and The Spring.

His illustrated Amor and Psyche (Opus V, 1880), after the ancient tale by Apuleius, is the second-largest group in our store, after The Tent. Its plates follow Psyche from Psyche on the Rock, left alone by the sea, to Psyche with the Lamp, the night she sees her husband Cupid, and the Wedding Feast of Cupid and Psyche.

A Life, Dramas and A Love: The City Cycles

In the 1880s Klinger turned his etching needle on modern city life. Three cycles tell harsh stories of poverty, crime and love in the growing cities of imperial Germany.

A Life (Ein Leben, Opus VIII, 1884) follows a young woman from Dreams through seduction and desertion to the street, as in Into the Gutter!, and on to Christ and the Sinners and Back to Nothingness.

Dramas (Dramen, Opus IX, 1883) takes its stories from Berlin newspapers and history. The Museum of Modern Art in New York describes the set as a look at the human cost of Germany’s fast industrial growth. The three plates of A Mother tell of a woman who in 1881 threw herself and her son into a Berlin canal; she survived and he did not. A Murder and In Flagranti are crimes of passion, and the three March Days plates show street fighting like that of the 1848 revolution, set in Klinger’s own Berlin.

A Love (Eine Liebe, Opus X, 1887) is a ten-plate love affair that ends in disgrace and death: from First Encounter and Kiss in the Park through Shame to Death. The Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests the story may draw on an episode from Klinger’s own life.

Compare these cycles with the social prints of Käthe Kollwitz, who learned much from Klinger, and with Edvard Munch.

Painting and Drawing: Klinger’s Big Idea

Klinger wrote down his ideas in Paris, and in 1891 published them as a short book, Malerei und Zeichnung (Painting and Drawing). His argument was simple and influential: painting is for colour, light and the beauty of the visible world, but drawing and printmaking, which he called Griffelkunst (the art of the stylus), are the right place for the imagination: dreams, fears, satire and the dark side of life.

The book explains why he worked in cycles. A sequence of black-and-white prints could tell a story or explore an idea the way a piece of music develops a theme, which is why he gave them opus numbers. Klinger loved music; he made a Brahms Fantasy (Opus XII, 1894) in honour of Johannes Brahms, combining his etchings with printed music of Brahms’s songs, and Brahms dedicated his Four Serious Songs to Klinger in 1896. See our music art prints.

Klinger also made quieter work: the Four Landscapes (Opus VII), such as Noon and Moonlit Night, and the early sketches Siesta and Wanderer’s End.

Paris, Rome and the Big Paintings

Klinger wanted to be a great painter as well as an etcher. In Paris (1883–86) and then in Rome (1888–93) he worked on huge canvases in which classical myth and Christianity meet. The Judgment of Paris (1885–87), owned by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and on loan to Leipzig, is a large modern take on the Greek myth.

The Crucifixion of Christ (1888–91, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig), nearly five metres wide, caused a scandal when it was shown in Dresden in 1893, because Klinger painted Christ completely naked. Our store has his first sketch for it. In 1918, 63 Leipzig citizens bought the painting and gave it to the museum. The Blue Hour (1890), with three nude women by a fire at dusk, and Christ on Olympus (1897), in which Christ enters the home of the Greek gods, are also in Leipzig. Gustav Klimt praised Christ on Olympus when it was shown in Munich in 1898. Klinger’s Pietà in Dresden was lost in the Second World War.

Italy also gave him colour. Look for the sunny Portrait of a Roman Woman on a Flat Roof in Rome (1891), the watercolour View of Siena and the sea fantasy Nereids in a Great Shell. If you like these, see the classical paintings of Anselm Feuerbach and Hans von Marées, Germans who also worked in Rome.

On Death: Klinger’s Darkest Cycles

Death runs through all of Klinger’s work, but two cycles are devoted to it. On Death, Part One (Vom Tode I, Opus XI, 1889) shows death striking without warning in ordinary life: the Sea swallows a ship, death waits On the Rails, and death comes to Sailors, a farmer and a child. It ends with Death as Saviour.

On Death, Part Two (Vom Tode II, Opus XIII, 1898–1910) widens the view to death’s power over all people: War, Plague, rulers, the Philosopher and the Genius, and Time and Fame. The last plate, To Beauty, ends the cycle with a small figure kneeling before a calm sea.

These are among his most powerful prints. Hang them with the Albrecht Dürer engravings and Rembrandt etchings Klinger admired, or with James Ensor.

Klinger the Sculptor: Beethoven

Back in Leipzig from 1893, Klinger turned more and more to sculpture. Following new research showing that ancient Greek statues had been painted, he built his figures from marbles of different colours combined with bronze, ivory and gems. Cassandra (1886–96) and his Salome figures belong to this period. In 1897 he became a professor at the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Arts.

His masterpiece is Beethoven (1902), a figure of the composer about 3.1 metres high, seated bare to the waist on a bronze throne with an eagle at his feet. Klinger first had the idea in Paris in the 1880s. The body is Greek marble from Syros, the robe a pale marble from South Tyrol, the rock and eagle Pyrenean marble; the eagle has amber eyes, the throne has ivory angel heads and mosaic strips of glass, agate, jasper and mother-of-pearl on gold.

In April 1902 the Vienna Secession built its whole 14th exhibition around the statue. Gustav Klimt painted his Beethoven Frieze for the show, and Gustav Mahler conducted music from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the opening. Vienna did not buy the statue; Leipzig did, for 250,000 marks raised by private donors, and it stands today in the Museum der bildenden Künste.

Klinger’s Brahms monument has stood in the Laeiszhalle concert hall in Hamburg since 1909. That same year his huge wall painting The Prime of Greece, about 6 by 20 metres, was unveiled in the main hall of Leipzig University for its 500th anniversary; it burned in the Second World War. He also helped young artists: on his initiative the Villa Romana in Florence was set up in 1905 as a house and prize for German artists. Klimt passed his place to Max Kurzweil, and in 1906 the prize went to the young Max Beckmann.

The Tent and the Last Years

For about fifteen years Klinger’s partner was the writer Elsa Asenijeff, who also modelled for him; their daughter Desirée was born in Paris in 1900 and raised by a foster mother. From 1911 the young model Gertrud Bock became his new companion, and his relationship with Elsa was over by 1916.

His last print cycle, The Tent (Zelt, Opus XIV, 1915), is a long fairy tale in 46 etchings, full of queens, magicians, swans and journeys through swamps and mountains. Our store has all 46, from the opening plates to The Swans and The Swan Prince.

In autumn 1919 Klinger suffered a stroke. Late that year he married Gertrud Bock, to whom he left his estate. He died at his vineyard house in Großjena near Naumburg in early July 1920, aged 63 (sources give 4 or 5 July), and was buried there on his vineyard.

Legacy

Klinger was one of the most admired artists in Germany around 1900, and his prints reached far beyond it. Käthe Kollwitz and Edvard Munch learned from his cycles, and Max Beckmann and Ernst Barlach quoted his images. The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico called him the “modern artist par excellence”, and Max Ernst and the Surrealists saw A Glove as a forerunner of their dream pictures.

His sculpture fell out of fashion after his death, but the prints never lost their power, and Leipzig still names streets, a park, a bridge and a school after him. If you like Klinger, look too at Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, Fernand Khnopff, Odilon Redon, Adolph Menzel and Hans Thoma, and our Symbolism art prints.

Famous Max Klinger Works

Nine works to start with, all in our collection:

Abduction

A Glove, plate 9, 1881. A winged beast smashes through the window and flies off with the glove. Our hero image.

The Walker

1878, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. A hold-up at a red brick wall: the painting that launched his career.

Eve

Eve and the Future, plate 1, 1880. Eve alone in the forest, before the fall.

Psyche on the Rock

Amor and Psyche, 1880. Psyche waits on a cliff above the sea for an unknown husband.

March Days I

Dramas, 1883. Street fighting in a crowded Berlin square.

Into the Gutter

A Life, 1884. The heroine of A Life pushed into ruin by grotesque figures.

Kiss in the Park

A Love, plate 4, 1887. The happy height of a love story that ends in tragedy.

Death as Saviour

On Death I, plate 10, 1889. The closing image of the first On Death cycle, framed like an altarpiece.

To Beauty

On Death II, final plate. A tiny figure kneels in a meadow between tall trees, facing the open sea.

What Our Max Klinger Prints Show

Our Max Klinger collection holds 289 prints. Most are plates from his numbered etching cycles, so you can build a matching set from one story, and a smaller group reproduces his paintings, watercolours and drawings.

The Tent and Amor and Psyche are the largest groups. For a complete story on one wall, choose the ten plates of A Glove or the ten of A Love.

How to Decorate with Max Klinger Prints

• Living room: a wide plate such as Abduction, Anxieties or Triumph works over a sofa or sideboard; their letterbox shape fills a long wall.
• Hallway or stairs: hang a whole cycle in order in matching black frames, such as the ten plates of A Glove from Place to Cupid. It reads like a silent film.
• Study or library: the Philosopher, Genius or To Beauty give a quiet, thoughtful mood.
• Bedroom: the myths and lovers, Eve, Psyche on the Rock or Kiss in the Park. Browse more mythology art prints.
• A pop of colour: his rare colour works, The Walker, Roman Woman on a Flat Roof or View of Siena, warm up a gallery wall of black-and-white etchings.
• Frames and sizes: etchings look best in thin black or dark wood frames with a wide white or ivory mat, from 8×10 to 18×24 inches; the paintings hold up larger.

Frequently Asked Questions